Grading the writing

I have tried a few articles with this tool and to be frank I do not want to use it again. It sure helps make the article more easier to read, but it is not above human judgement.

I tried pasting part of a famous children’s novel, Heidi, into the Hemingway App editor and it gave the writing a ‘Poor – Grade 17’ rating! The rating is outright ridiculous sometimes.

Hemingway App score for text from ‘Heidi’

Highlighter

The Hemingway App highlights words that should be replaced for simplicity, but sometimes those are the most effective words in the prose.

This editor seems to give better rating if you have less text, may be around 300 words. Anything more, the editor scores lesser and lesser. So, the overall grade seems much worse.

Now check this screenshot. It is the rating for this article in full.

Hemingway App rating for this article

This article’s rating is ‘Good – Grade 6’; here you see that it highlights that the word ‘very’ should be removed. So, is it meaningful when we remove it and make it ‘hard and hard sentences‘?? Likewise, it highlights ‘basically’!

Failed the test

Check out the below screenshot too. I added meaningless random words at the end of the second paragraph and still got a ‘Good’ rating unbelievably!

Meaningless words – good rating

Unreliable but can be used as a pointer

Things like these make the Hemingway App unreliable.

All in all, the Hemingway App might be useful if you have less text and want to make the text extremely simple to read.

This App intends to help writers fine-tune their text. And a great amount of hard work must have gone into it by the developers which is well appreciated.

But again, when you take help of this editor, you need to make sure that the readability is not lost altogether 😉

What are your thoughts on this?

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Priyadarshini Rajendran is a travel enthusiast, avid reader and a passionate writer. She has a few of her books published and is writing more books. Before becoming a full-time writer, she worked as a software consultant taking breaks for her travels.
Her blog is her passion and she writes about travel, books and food on the blog. She offers customized itineraries for South Indian destinations.

Thanks for this post, I love finding good apps like this. I am always looking for new apps to try this one seems worth testing out. I am always writing and the proofreading process can be challenging at times, so this is good.